


A Secret Ministry

by deskclutter



Category: Stardust - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-25
Updated: 2010-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 06:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deskclutter/pseuds/deskclutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tristran and Yvaine in the early morning, hiking along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Secret Ministry

**Title:** A Secret Ministry  
**Day/Theme:** October 11th / a deer in the headlights  
**Series:** Stardust (bookverse)  
**Character/Pairing:** Tristran, Yvaine  
**Rating:** G

It was early in the morning when they set out, their breaths frosting the air despite the general absence of true winter. The hour seemed to command some odd respect, so neither of them spoke. In truth, they did not need words after having travelled together for so long.

A bird began to call from high up in the forest's branches, alarming the forest of the dawn. It was half-eerie, the silence of the early morning punctuated by the bird's warbling cheep. It could not be a phoenix. Such birds lived far south, and there could only ever be one. Perhaps it was made of gold-twined clockwork; the nearest town belonged to toymakers of the most ingenious kind, elderly Geppettos and Chinese craftsmen who had congregated together to form a beautifully mechanised hamlet.

But they had come away from there, and there was only the sound of the bird in the silence. Tristran recalled early schooldays in Wall; this silence was the sort of silence even young boys respected amidst rumpled thoughts of ink and marbles and over-strict schoolteachers who could not appreciate the lure of a summer's day. He'd used to wander, half-bewitched, over the silent fields, until his sister had started going to school with him, whereupon the sacred silence became unbearable to her and had been routinely broken five minutes into their walk. Before, however, he would not have been surprised should some faerie creature or fey beast come dancing or trundling over the fields towards him, and they should have nodded at each other and passed on, for such silence is a language known to many, even the most dangerous creatures of all.

"Stop!" Yvaine breathed, her hand flashing out to block his step. Tristran shook himself back to the present, his hand partway to his sword, which he stayed when he looked up.

A deer stood frozen, muscles bunched together to leap quickly, away! But not yet. The deer looked at him, and he at the deer. Its liquid brown eyes bespoke a faint terror and yet an understanding at the same time. This deer was an observer of the silence, of course, and so was Tristran, and that understanding passed between them as quickly as the spark of thought to move a muscle. Then it uncurled its frozen limbs and sped off.

"It was a deer," Yvaine said in a whisper constructed half of wonderment and half of something else. "It was alive."

"Do you not see many deer?" Tristran asked in a hush, his brow knotted in contemplation.

"How many have you seen since you have come into Faerie?" asked Yvaine softly, but with no less ginger in that whisper than her normal conversation with him. "One is far more like to see a unicorn, or a lion, or a wolf, or a chimera, or even a clockwork animal than a deer."

"I hadn't thought about it," Tristran admitted, and after that they lapsed back into a comfortable silence until the noonday sun shone warm on their heads at which point they stopped at an inn for lunch.

**Author's Note:**

> _The Frost performs its secret ministry,  
> Unhelped by any wind.The owlet's cry  
> Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before._  
> \- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight.  
> I didn't intend to base the fic off this scrap of verse (the birdcry, for instance, is the fault of this bird I used to hear every morning when I got up at six to catch my schoolbus), but it popped into my head when I wrote the first sentence and has kind of had an influence on the rest of it. I always pick my titles out after I write the fic (except for a few special cases) because I suck at them, but this seemed appropriate.  
> ...Well, I _hope_ it isn't just me who feels weird when I go out early in the morning.


End file.
